Coen Brothers Q&A

Share.

The siblings dicsuss their new feature, A Serious Man.

By Chris Tilly

Joel and Ethan Coen have made their name writing and directing quirky masterpieces like Fargo, The Big Lebowski and the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. This week they return to cinemas with A Serious Man, the bittersweet tale of a physics teacher whose life spirals out of control during a 1967 summer in a quiet Midwestern town. IGN caught up with them to discuss their writing process, the personal nature of the story, and the film's reception in rabbi circles.

IGN: When you start writing a script, do you know going in whether it will be a comedy or drama, or do you not even think in those terms?

Joel: We don't even think in those terms really. With this one we were thinking about the setting - it did really start with the time and the place. It started on the idea of this character, an academic, to whom bad things start happening and keep happening. You're obviously aware that it can be funny, or that it can be the kind of thing that people will find funny, but in your own mind you don't like to pigeon-hole it as tragedy or comedy or drama.

IGN: How does your writing process work – do you sit in a room and work together, or do you write separately?

Ethan: It's in a room together usually. And start at the beginning usually. That isn't to say that it's all written chronologically from beginning to end. But that's more or less the way it goes. We go into the office and work pretty regular hours.

IGN: Do you ever get writer's block?

Ethan: There are times when you get stuck in the middle of some project or other, and you maybe need to go away from it for a while and do something else, or go away from it for a while and do nothing, until you've kind of washed your brain a little bit.

Joel: Sometimes we'll work on more than one thing at one time. Even this one overlapped a bit with two others - Burn After Reading and the adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy. The writing overlapped, or the three of them spilled into each other, but we finished all three before we started shooting any of them.

IGN: The time and place is very specific to your childhoods - does that make this your most personal film?

Ethan: It's personal in that it was part of our own experience, growing up in a community like this. At that time we were about the age of the kid in the movie. That was probably the attraction. What we were thinking about when we started the project was to do something specifically about a story set at that time in the Jewish community in the Midwest. So it's personal by virtue of all the coincidences with our own lives and upbringing, but the story itself is made up, just like all of the other movies that we've made.

Click above for the Serious Man trailer.

IGN: There's lots of Jewish terminology and symbolism in the film - how has it been received by the Jewish community in the States?

Joel: Yeah - it's been received very positively, which is nice. Especially in the area that we made it - that community has been very enthusiastic about it. There are always a few exceptions, that's the risk that you take when you make a movie that's very specific about any ethnicity or religion, people are going to get their feathers ruffled, but not much - less than we expected.